Despite President Donald Trump’s Department of Veterans Affairs and Navy moving to end cruel animal testing, the National Institutes of Health, under Director Jay Bhattacharya, has renewed millions in funding for controversial experiments, including THC tests on monkeys at Harvard, tick bites on beagle puppies, and Anthony Fauci’s notorious “Monkey Island,” prompting criticism from watchdog group White Coat Waste.
Last month, Gateway Pundit reported how President Trump’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Doug Collins, confirmed the department will end primate testing before a 2026 deadline set by Congress.
Following years of campaigning by the watchdog organization White Coat Waste, President Trump’s first administration set the VA on the path to ending testing on dogs, cats and primates after WCW exposed how the agency was giving puppies heart attacks, injecting monkeys with angel dust, crippling kittens, drilling into cat’s skulls, and much more.
Also in May, Trump’s U.S. Navy banned all testing on dogs and cats. The Navy credited WCW, as well as journalist Laura Loomer, the Department of Government Efficiency, and Senator Rand Paul, “for bringing the issue of animal abuse to our attention, leading to the Navy’s decision to ban medical research testing on cats and dogs.”
But holdovers from the Obama and Biden Administrations appear to be preventing this kind of progress at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
A Barack Obama-era NIH staffer, Dr. Nicole Kleinstreuer, has been appointed by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya to be the NIH’s Acting Deputy Director for Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives. Earlier this month, Kleinstreuer told NPR that the NIH has “no intention of just phasing out animal studies overnight.”
The NIH has renewed several controversial animal testing projects initiated by Dr. Anthony Fauci and other NIH staff members.
Gateway Pundit has learned that the NIH has re-upped grant funds for THC experiments on young monkeys at Harvard University’s McLean Hospital that WCW exposed through a Freedom of Information Act request and that Gateway covered in April. The NIH has committed five more years of taxpayer funding to the project, which was initially scheduled to end on April 30, 2025, and has now received nearly $4.5 million.
The Daily Caller recently reported that, “Virologist Jeffery Taubenberger, a longtime Fauci ally who for more than a decade has defended the practice of enhancing viruses known as gain-of-function (GOF) virology, ascended to the top of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) on April 24.” Taubenberger now runs NIAID, the NIH division that Fauci helmed for nearly four decades.
This may explain why, as Gateway Pundit reported in late April, NIAID recently renewed funding for Dr. Anthony Fauci’s infamously cruel “Monkey Island” off the coast of South Carolina. Media reports have been highlighting the public safety issues posed by the taxpayer-funded monkey colony that confines over 3,300 primates who are bred and then shipped to labs for deadly and horrific “maximum pain” research. Documents obtained by WCW show an estimated 500 to 600 monkeys are taken from the island each year and sent to NIH and other government labs, where they’re infected with viruses, mutilated, and killed.
As Laura Loomer reported, NIAID has also renewed grants for tick bite experiments on 400 beagle puppies at the University of Columbia-Missouri that were uncovered by a WCW investigation.
Right in NIH’s own headquarters, the agency is also still paying for experiments that drill into monkeys’ skulls and damage their brains with acid, isolate and chain the monkeys in tiny cages, and then terrorize them with rubber snakes and “jumping” toy spiders. The tests have been continuously funded for nearly five decades and the NIH has spent over $62 million on them.
WCW was the first to expose never-before-seen videos from inside the NIH “Fear Factory” laboratory through a successful 2019 FOIA lawsuit against the NIH. The investigation and their work with Congress to shut the lab down prompted officials to alert Dr. Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins about the experiments “targeted by White Coat Waste.”
WCW President and Founder Anthony Bellotti told Gateway Pundit, “As the watchdog that first exposed Fauci’s funding for beagle abuse, Monkey Island, and transgender mice, we’re alarmed that the NIH continues to renew these and other multi-million-dollar Biden-Fauci boondoggles. President Trump’s message is clear: cut NIH’s wasteful spending. But Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and bureaucrats at the NIH either didn’t get Trump’s memo—or they’re ignoring it. While Trump’s Pentagon and V.A. are cutting and banning cruel pet and primate experiments following WCW investigations, Biden-Fauci holdovers at NIH are defiantly doubling down on animal testing. Under Bhattacharya, the NIH is renewing payouts to animal labs where kittens have their eyes sewn shut and beagles are poisoned, blinded and infested with ticks. It’s pouring more money into primate abuse and promoting Biden and Fauci holdovers who are undermining Trump’s promise to drain the NIH swamp. The solution to the NIH’s animal testing addiction is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness!”
In May, the NIH announced it shut down its last in-house beagle testing lab following a nine-year WCW campaign. Notably, documents show that the NIH had defended the deadly dog lab in an email to Congress just weeks before it was shuttered.
Though the Trump-haters at PETA keep making the media rounds trying to claim victory for this and other WCW wins, WCW remains the only animal advocacy organization to shut down any government primate lab in nearly a decade, any government dog testing labs in almost 20 years, and any government cat lab in the last 40 years.
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